


The fence between now and future

by Starbase Blake (galaxyostars)



Series: From Ayden Blake to Jhalen Novu [3]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Brekkians, Expansion on Symbiosis, Ornarans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 09:27:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17547053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxyostars/pseuds/Starbase%20Blake
Summary: When his timeline is effectively erased, a man from the future returned to his homeland to change the course of demise set by his people. Convincing them, however, was going to take time.





	The fence between now and future

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic based off one of my characters from Starbase 118 and follows his movements after leaving the USS Veritas.
> 
> For those who have watched The Next Generation, this particular story picks up the mess the Enterprise-D left behind in Symbiosis between the Ornarans and the Brekkians, approximately 30 years later. Here's a quick update on how things are traveling between the two: https://fednewsservice.com/2015/01/19/peace-talks-between-brekka-and-ornara-end-with-a-fistfight-between-planetary-ambassadors/
> 
> Since this is a bit of an obscure piece - ie, no backstory on AO3 about the setting, characters, or really any establishment of their universe - I've left links to our wiki to help fill in the gap. Hopefully, however, they're not really needed.

[Jhalen Novu](https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Jhalen_Novu) leaned against a fence post, overlooking the thirty acreage of land the six of them had fled to. The sun was setting, leaving purple streaks across the bottom of the sky as the stars began to glisten above his head. By rights, this land belonged to his great aunt Serrella, long deceased. A suicide, following the initial downfall of the easy-living [Brekkian](https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=Brekkian) society. His mother inherited the land by default, but she’d likely never intend to ever set foot on the planet, let alone this land, in the next decade—she was more comfortable on the other side of the galaxy.

He wasn’t sure if he considered Serrella or his grandfather as villains or victims of their own making. Perhaps they were victims of the overall Brekkian society. It took two hundred years for the Brekkians to get to the point they were in before Starfleet suddenly became involved – that’s two hundred years of cultivation of felicium, of their ancestor’s profiting on the Ornaran hard-working lifestyles.

As the light faded from the sky, a figure came to stand next to him, also leaning her arms against the rudimentary wooden fence that some poor Ornaran probably put up thirty-odd years ago. It was strange to think thirty years really wasn’t that long a period.

“You disapprove of what happened in Nar Talone,” he breathed, almost as if he sensed the conflict and distaste radiating from her features.

Whylen sighed, “I’m on the fence.”

He looked over at her. “No, you’re standing _next_ to it.”

She glowered at him, and he cracked an amused smile at his own joke.

“C’mon, that was a _little_ funny.”

“No. No, it was not.”

He sighed, clasping his hands together. “What’s on your mind?”

There was silence, a look of contemplation crossing her face. Her nose creased a little. Evidently, this would be a complicated question for her to ask, and for him to answer. “Your name isn’t Jhalen Novu.”

“What gave you that impression?”

“There’s no Jhalen Novu that matches your description.”

Ah, so she’d checked up on him. It was nice to know that at least one of the crew did their homework. “Then my name is not Jhalen Novu.”

“What’s your real name?”

“I’ve gone by a few. None of them are important anymore.”

Whylen gave a frustrated huff, brushing windswept hair away from her face. “Is there anything you _will_ tell me?”

There was another pause at this. He didn’t turn to look at her—no, that would ruin the mystery that he enjoyed around himself nowadays—but he stared out towards the sunset. “239101.22.”

He received a perplexed look from the blonde woman. “Is that date supposed to mean something?”

“It’s my birth date,” Jhalen glanced at her from the corner of his eye, a smug smile pulling at the corner of his lips.

She shook her head. “You gotta work on your mathematics. That’d make you six years old.”

“And yet here I am, sitting pretty on a _hundred_ and six.”

Her mouth dropped a little as she examined him more closely as if trying to locate any sign that he was lying to her. But he wasn’t—he was dead serious. It was all true.

“. . . that would require travel through . . . temporal _dimensions_! That’s _impossible!_ ”

Jhalen shrugged. “Nothing’s impossible. Not really.”

She ran a hand through her long hair, gripping at the back of her skull for a moment before stepping away from the fence, looking anywhere but at Jhalen Novu. “And your ears? Not just from a weird accident, right?”

“My father was Vulcan,” he nodded.

Another exasperated breath came from the woman as she tried to come to terms with everything he was telling her. She pointed at him but drew her hand back to her chest.

“What I don’t understand is why you’re here, on this planet,” she finally said, as if she were speaking to an alien and not someone who just held up many figures-head leaders of the planet until they signed a document that forced them all to actively work together. “You’re only part Brekkian—you could get away, forget about this place without a second thought!”

And there was the kicker, really. He’d returned to 2391 to meet his father, intending to lie down somewhere and allow his condition to take over his body—to just _die_. But he had been thoroughly convinced to do otherwise, to stand up and help. Not because someone else wanted him to, but because he had the means to do so. He had nearly every advantage in the book to do so.

The [chronometric radiation interspatial transporter brace](https://wiki.starbase118.net/wiki/index.php?title=CRI_brace) that had brought him here was safely tucked away, out of radiation dosages. The irony of his plight, however, was that he required an identity to leave Brekka—so even if he _wanted_ to go, he’d be held up by the planet’s security task force. Developing a false identity was problematic on a world where the crime was relegated to drug trafficking through the governmental system—no one _needed_ false identification, thus no one knew how to create it.

He was here because he could be the spearhead for change, and could be easily forgotten in the blink of an eye. But, like everything he’d done over the last five years of his life, it wasn’t _all_ because of this.

“My mother was only part Brekkian as well,” he finally said. “She left the homeworld to do something _good_ with her life—wanted to make up for all the wrongs my grandfather was responsible for. She joined Starfleet, of all institutions. Yet she returned here because she wanted my sister and myself to love Brekka as a homeland, despite its flaws. But it betrayed her.”

He pushed away from the fence a little, crossing his arms and turning so his back was now leaning against the post, his attention directly on Whylen.

“They killed My father the year of my birth. There was an attack in Kekorna by a group attempting to provoke Seritona into conflict with the Ornarans. They attacked the city, my mother and father got caught in the crossfire. While my mother shielded children who were not her own, my father went into the danger zone to rescue civilians,” he sighed. “It wasn’t the terrorists that killed my father. Our own military saw him as a threat and shot him on the spot.”

His casual tone had done nothing to stop the wince Whylen gave as she imagined the events that took place. “I’d heard about the attack, but . . .” she hesitated. “No one spoke about how many people they killed.”

“Not even our own news sources,” he concurred. “Because attacks like Kekorna happen _daily_ across our planet now. It is a symptom of our downgrading society.”

There was another pause, but Whylen built up the courage to ask another question—one that he assumed she wouldn’t ever build to. “You say you’re from the future. So you’ve _seen_ what we become.”

Jhalen acknowledged the statement, but he didn’t enlighten her on the exact events he remembered. “My timeline no longer exists. Not because of what we did here today,” he quickly added, “but for other reasons, unrelated to this. But you’re right. I’ve seen how bad things can get if we do not act immediately.”

“And how bad can it get?”

He gave a frustrated sigh and tried to think of a way to give her the specifics, while also not giving her the specifics. It was a delicate balance he had to keep, but one he’d learned long ago. “I have seen war at the most inopportune times, for everyone. I’ve seen chances squandered and wasted because of the people that placed themselves in power. I have seen a planet _burning_ , because it lit itself alight.” There was a pause between them as they stared into the darkening landscape. “I have seen the splintering of a civilization, because they were too busy enthralled by the violence they thought to be effective, instead of using their silver tongues.”

In the 2360s, Brekkians were known for settling their differences civilly. Physical conflict was not in their nature unless they were provoked. They could be peaceful—they’d seen and experienced it before, before the exploitation of Ornara. It _was_ possible, but it was a matter of getting their society back to that position, which would take time. Jhalen acknowledged and was fully prepared for that fact.

But today, as hordes of Brekkians fell to the bleak outcomes that riddled their sub-par lifestyles as they were no longer propped up by the work of Ornara, they were losing their ability to negotiate, to speak and convince one another. Whylen was right—Brekkians were not known to give that of which had not been paid for. Violence was an easy way out that the people had once frowned upon. They _admonished_ the Ornarans for similar tactics when attempting to get their felicium fix.

It was a matter of dragging them back from the edge. It would be a long road, but it would be worth it.

“That’s . . . that’s a lot to take in,” Whylen finally said, looking down at her feet. The light of the sun had all but dissipated during the conversation, leaving her but a silhouette framed against the lighting of the home behind her.

“It is,” he nodded again. “To be honest, though, I often ask myself if I am cheating, by being here now, and not just letting Brekka run its own course.”

“And what’s the general conclusion?”

“I arrived—dimensionally speaking—in 2391. I’ve been here, organically, for five years now. My home time period no longer exists, and therefore, I have no rules to work by. Events were set in motion that changes how I knew the galaxy would act around Brekka, but they will not affect those here on the planet, because they are the outcasts, victims of the poor leadership developed since the 60s.” Brown eyes looked up at the stars above, seeing the brightest light (Ornara) flickering. “It took Ornara five years to restart its cycle of life, and thirty years later, they are thriving. It took Brekka ten years just for divided territories to establish their own leadership—some of which were dictatorships. And we are _still here_ , while Ornara sends out their own exploration expeditions to the stars.”

“We only had one industry, and that was felicium.”

“Yes, but look what _individuals_ have done. Agriculture, farming, power and resources—all the vital industries that kept Ornara going were developed one by one, by young people who had never been privy to how it was once done before. Hell, Brekka has its own spatial sensor network thanks to the Betelguise twins who took the time to contact Ornaran specialists, to peacefully collaborate with them.”

“Yes, and Lordship Cos vi Le exiled them from Navellai once she learned of the collaboration.”

“And now we circle back to false leadership. Brekkians do not give that of which has not been paid for—and vi Le broke that philosophy when she took it by force. We should have applauded them for their efforts.”

“But if she were working under a unified government, she wouldn’t have had the capability to take it by force. Not legally, anyway.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

She scoffed at the notion, returning to lean against the fence herself—though she wouldn’t have seen the expanse of the land before her.

“The way I intend to go about this change is not proper,” Jhalen admitted. “It is still terrorism—we still have to invite fear. And while I don’t like it, it is a necessity. Silver-tongued negotiation still requires force.”

“It’s not _that_ that’s getting me,” she interjected. “I understand that fine. It’s _following through_ on our threats that’s doing my head in.”

“Hopefully we won’t have to.”

“But if we do? They expect hellfire to rain down upon them,” Whylen stated coldly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Novu, but there are only six of us, and fifty-two of them.”

“You’re right. But during the eight hours they were held captive in their own building, not one of them attempted to break free.”

“What would we have done if they _had_?”

He shrugged again. Jhalen didn’t agree with violence. He avoided being near firearms, held an extreme distaste for those that supposedly enjoyed firing one. What would he have done, had one of the fifty-two attempted to break out of the building or harm one of his people?

Nothing frightened a Brekkian leader more than themselves.

“I’ve been here for five years. During that time, I collected every little dirty piece of information about each of people in power on Brekka that I could find. Some leaders are legitimate—they have nothing to hide and want to do right by their people. But others? If Goveiom Lebistrade learned of Lordship vi Le’s own agreement with off-worlders that proved the manipulation of her constituents, that would mean conflict vi Le cannot afford. Literally. She has no way to stop a hostile takeover that her people are probably praying for.”

Jhalen had amazed the Brekkian woman again, the shine of her eyes flickering over to him. “That’s your plan? Blackmail?”

“There is no better weapon against a leader than their own citizens.”

And given the violence the citizens were engaging in or facing on a near-daily basis, on the brink of civil war, such weapons were primed and waiting to be fired at the nearest wrong-doer.

“The journey ahead will be long, Whylen. We aren’t in for an easy fight. But I know that, with time, things will become stable.”


End file.
